It’s hard to step outside nowadays without being confronted with a massive picture of Piers Morgan. In the adverts for his new TalkTV show he can be seen crushing the House of Commons in his hands or pointing to an address for the channel’s complaints department. ‘Love him or hate him,’ the adverts declare, ‘you won’t want to miss him.’ Actually, it seems, people don’t mind if they do. At the last count, barely 40,000 tuned in.
In contrast, Morgan’s final appearance on Good Morning Britain drew almost two million viewers. So what’s going on? One answer is that TalkTV, like any new channel, will take a while to establish itself. But the other point is that Piers Morgan Uncensored is vying with lots of other big-name chat-show presenters across a variety of platforms for a limited amount of public attention.
Buses, trains, roadside billboards and newspapers carry pictures of new shows for star broadcasters. A 30ft picture of Andrew Marr proclaims that ‘he’s got his voice back’ via LBC radio – which is pushing its breakfast show man, Nick Ferrari, just as hard. And Andrew Neil is back, his old BBC1 show reincarnated on Channel 4 on Sunday evenings with almost 400,000 viewers. American–style programming that promotes individuals over institutions – like Jon Stewart or Jimmy Kimmel – seems to be coming to Britain.
It was about this time last year that GB News first appeared on our TV screens. Neil was its front man, but his show lasted for just a fortnight before he took a summer break and didn’t come back. He said later that his vision for the broadcaster was at odds with what he saw as a ‘British Fox News’ intent on waging a culture war. But GB News now seems to be finding its feet with a monthly audience of more than two million, regularly overtaking Sky News.
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